Penn & Teller: Bullshit!

Penn & Teller: Bullshit! (2003 – 2010), also known as Penn & Teller: Bullsh*t!, Penn & Teller: Bullsh**!, Penn & Teller: BS!, and informally as Bullshit!, is an AmericanEmmy-nominated television series on the premium cable channel Showtime. It is hosted by professional magicians/comediansPenn & Teller, and inherits their characteristically blunt, aggressive presentation. The show aims to debunk an array of popular misconceptions, sometimes supernatural in nature. It criticizes proponents of such things, often citing ulterior or financial motives. The stated aim of the show is to apply critical thinking to misconceptions.

Penn: [Posing over a fake grave of Harry Houdini] Harry, can you believe it? The same bullshit you so thoroughly debunked almost a century ago is continuing, and even enjoying a resurgence. [To camera] See? Anyone can talk to the dead. Getting an answer, that's the hard part.

Teller: [Through the plastic gravestone] Bullshit!

Penn: [Penn explains why there is so much vulgarity on the show] You'll notice much more obscenity than we usually use. That's not just because it's on Showtime, and we want to get some attention. It's also a legal matter. If one calls people liars and quacks, one can be sued and lose a lot of one's money. But "motherfuckers" and "assholes" is pretty safe. If we said it was all scams, we could also be in trouble. But "bullshit", oddly, is safe. So forgive all the bullshit language. We're trying to talk about the truth without spending the rest of our lives in court because of litigious motherfuckers!

Penn: Before we bust up this party- and god dammit we're gonna bust it up- we have to make it very clear where our hearts are. We have nothing but empathy for the people who are experiencing the loss and grief of the death of a loved one. That guy who lost his mom rips my heart out. I'm a momma's boy whose mom died a couple of years ago, and I'll never get over it, and my dad died at around the same time, and I was very close to both of them. I loved them so much there isn't a moment that goes by that I don't miss them. Houdini didn't really go nuts busting these mediums until he lost his mom. Once you've felt that pure grief, seeing it exploited can take away your sense of humor. Once a loved one has died, all we have is our memories of them. There is nothing more precious to me than my memories of my mom and dad. We don't give a rat's ass about the money these bastards are taking from the grief stricken; what we do care about deeply is the desecration of memories. These "performance artists" are, in a very real sense, mother-fuckers. That poor guy's grieving memories of his mother are now all fucked up by somebody else's images. All he will ever have left of his mom are memories, and this pig has pissed on those for a buck and a little un-earned fame. I'm sure these lame fucks tell themselves that they're easing the grief, but skits for money can not replace loving memories. How low do you have to be to exploit someone's true grief to sell some bullshit book?

Penn: One of the weird things Houdini discovered is that some of these mediums actually slip into believing their own bullshit. They forget their own misses, or as John Edward, the Biggest Douche in the Universe, does, rewrite them as hits that we're just not able to recognize. Cold reading can be done accidentally. That doesn't mean the psychic is a better person. Lying to themselves does not make lying to others OK. It can make intellectually lazy scumbags more convincing and dangerous. But even if these fucks know they're just making this shit up and pushing people's buttons, they tell themselves, "At least I'm comforting the bereaved." Who the fuck are they to decide that lying about the universe and a dead loved one is what the bereaved needs!? That's condescending bullshit!

Penn: You know, when you hear about people predicting the end of the world...they're always predicting 60 to 90 % of the world's population is going to get killed. It's odd how they're always planning on what they're gonna do when everyone else is dead. Teller and I have always played the odds, so, we're betting we're gonna die. You should see our credit card bills. They're higher than our cholesterol! Good thing we don't plan on paying 'em! [microphone appears] I'm sure that we...

Cameraman: Cut! Cut. The mic was in the shot. We have to go again.

Penn: Fuck you, it's the end of the world! If you live, you can fix it in post.

John Hogue: John Hogue; rogue scholar!

Penn: Get it? Hogue! Rogue! It rhymes! And scholar, well...not a chance.

Cameraman: Do you think that this tape will ever air?

Bruce Beach: I don't give that a very high rate of probability.

[on the subject of decoding Nostradamus' writings]

John Hogue: Quatrain 97 of century, Volume 6 reads, "At 45 degrees latitude, the sky will burn. Fire approaches the great New City." At latitude 45 degrees the only new city since Nostradamus' time that you could call great and new and vast is the city that rests between 40 degrees and 41 degrees latitude, which is Manhattan and New York. Now...that's a little off.

James Randi: Then, he's way off in Canada or some place. When [Nostradamus] said 'New City', he was referring to Naples [Italy]. He refers to it several times throughout his writings and makes it clear that he's talking about Naples. Not New York City.

Penn: [on the subject of Feng Shui] You know, Teller, I find it silly that some people think that how you arrange your furniture can affect your health. It seems so...so...so...hmmm, stupid. [drinks out of Penn & Teller: Bullshit bottled water]

Penn: [on the subject of bottled water] Consumers are offered water with names conveying pure and pristine water sources. Ever hear of Alaskan Falls water? That must come from the crystal-clear glacial waters of our 49th state, right? Sorry, folks. Alaskan flows from this liqui-box corporation building in Worthington, Ohio. Does the brand Yosemite conjure up visions of the cool, pristine waters rushing through California's high sierras? Well, then the marketers have done their jobs. The source of Yosemite bottled water is actually 400 miles away in Northwest Los Angeles. How about Everest Water? Could our piddly show possibly afford to send a camera crew to Nepal? NOT NECESSARY. Everest comes from the industrial section of Corpus Cristi, Texas! In fact if you read the fine print on the FUCKING LABEL, they even admit that the water comes from a MUNICIPAL SOURCE! THAT IS TAP WATER, brothers and sisters of the cult of the bottle!

Penn: In much of the rest of the world, [drinking] tap water equals rapid and severe weight loss, with the introduction of new, probably harmful, friends to your intestines and other organs. Are we so ashamed of our wonderful tap water, that we have to disguise it?

[Teller is acting as a pet psychic by finding out what a turtle is thinking through ESP]

Penn: I'm a pet psychic... psychic! I can tell you what your pet psychic is thinking and feeling. Your pet psychic is thinking "This is safe. No one can contradict me and realize I'm lying. I don't even have the balls to be a human psychic. I feel like such a pile of bullshit!"

Penn: When he [Norman Borlaug] won the Nobel Prize in 1970, they said he had saved a billion people. That's BILLION. "BUH!" That's Carl Sagan billion with a "B". And most of them were of different race from him. Norman is the greatest human being. And you've probably never heard of him.

Penn: Throughout history there's never been an abundance of food. All food is the product of technology; apples, corn, tomatoes, all modified. Every food has been changed through selective breeding or grafting. For ten thousand years each attempt at improvement has changed the DNA of the plant. Now some people are up-in-arms about changes in DNA. You know what? If you’re able to get up and have food you should celebrate. We should all dance about how much food we have. Why is anyone fighting food advance? A very small percentage of the world's population is fortunate enough to have the luxury of turning down food. The rest of the world spends most of its time trying to get any food. You know why? Technological problems. They got dirt, they got water, they got sun. They lack the technical ability to till or enrich the soil. They lack the machines to plant enough to feed their families. They lack the hybrid plants that produce more food per acre. We need to spread all the technology all we can, so all people everywhere can deal with the problem of too much food. We can't start getting picky because we've got enough food- that's just self-centered and racist. Unless you and yours are starving, you need to SHUT THE FUCK UP!

Norman Borlaug: [on the possibility of a world-wide switch to organic farming] We are almost 6.6 billion people, now. We can only feed about two-thirds of them. I don't see 2 billion volunteers to disappear.

[after some raw-foodists try to foist their food on other people, being rejected in the process]

Penn: We're pretty sure that if you live in a beach-house in the US, you probably shouldn't be trying to tell starving people in the rest of the world that you're fighting the technology that could feed their children.

Norman Borlaug: You can't build a peaceful world on empty stomachs and human misery.

Penn: We're not gonna tease or abuse the bull. He doesn't have a cute name like Elsie, or Moo-Moo, or Heiferlips. His name is Dave. Nothing funny about that. We wouldn't do anything to this animal that we wouldn't do to ourselves.

[Penn applies a branding iron to Teller's right buttock.].

Teller: [off-camera] Mother-FUCKER!

Penn: Hey! Cool, Dave, he can talk!

Penn: Ethical means moral or proper which differs for every person, it's something to discuss. It's not an absolute. It just sounds nice, it's like 'pro-choice' and 'pro-life', I mean- c'mon! Everyone is pro-choice and pro-life. It's for or against abortion that your group is about. And who wouldn't wanna treat animals ethically, anyway. Nobody gets off slapping their monkey or choking their chicken or roughing up their clam.

Penn: What shows like this!? Is HBO running a show called “Horse Shit” or “Crocka Shit”? What other shit shows are there out there? We rule shit!

Penn: In just a month after animals were released, they would be back in animal prison for trespassing, failure to pay their taxes, assaulting people- and each other, and for fucking and shitting all over the shitty, fuckin' place!

Jerry Vlasak: I think that violence and non-violence are not moral principles - they're tactics.

Penn: The PETA you don't know would outlaw fishing, circuses, dog shows, horseback riding and zoos. They even oppose using service animals like eye-dogs for the blind. Fucking blind bastards torturing those dogs! In PETA, there's no room for Kentucky Fried Chicken, or the Kentucky Derby. See you, Shamu! And forget about smearing honey all over your fuck buddy, because even bees are persecuted by the man. And pets are forbidden in PETA's world too. That's right! No pets. Hey all you pet lovers who donate to PETA, feel like a sucker yet?

[On PETA's usage of Holocaust footage for its campaigns].

Dennis Prager: We have a generation here in America, of young people, who don't know what evil is [cf. generations past]. They've never suffered. They don't know Nazism. They don't know Communism. They don't know torture, concentration camps, or death squads. And so they're so naive, that they think the worst evil is done to animals and the environment.

Penn: [Teller shows a pan] This is drugs. [Teller shows some eggs, with the description of several types of civil liberties written on them] These are your liberties. [cut to Penn on a steamroller] AND THIS IS THE GOVERNMENT.

Penn: It's fair to say that the Bible contains equal amounts of fact, history, and pizza.

Penn: Now why wouldn't God just appear to Pharaoh, and say it himself? Because God works in mysterious, inefficient, and breathtakingly cruel ways.

Penn: Monty Python's Life of Brian was more historically accurate than Mel Gibson's The Passion of the Christ.

Penn[repeatedly]: Elvis didn't do no drugs!

Penn: God works in mysterious, inefficient, and breathtakingly cruel ways.

this statement is a rebuke to the famous assertion by William Cowper: "God moves in a mysterious way, His wonders to perform He plants his footsteps in the sea, And rides upon the storm."

Penn: Take some time and put the Bible on your summer reading list. Try and stick with it cover to cover. Not because it teaches history; we've shown you it doesn't. Read it because you'll see for yourself what the Bible is all about. It sure isn't great literature. If it were published as fiction, no reviewer would give it a passing grade. There are some vivid scenes and some quotable phrases, but there's no plot, no structure, there's a tremendous amount of filler, and the characters are painfully one-dimensional. Whatever you do, don't read the Bible for a moral code: it advocates prejudice, cruelty, superstition, and murder. Read it because: we need more atheists — and nothin' will get you there faster than readin' the damn Bible.

Penn: "Saint cow". So she is literally saying, "Holy cow!", in Spanish. But "holy cow" is a derogatory reference to the Hindu belief in the sacredness of cows. Ginny certainly doesn't believe in the holiness of cows, so taking that Lord's name in vain is perfectly acceptable. She doesn't buy the holy-cow myth. Therefore, if you didn't actually believe that Jesus is God — and most of the world doesn't — if you were, for example, a Hindu, shouting…

[Teller drops a bowling ball on Penn's foot.]

Penn: … JESUS CHRIST'S!… name… in a situation where you… or someone you know, somehow, accidentally… dropped a bowling ball on your FOOT… would be, by Ginny's standards… perfectly polite. [Penn looks like he wants to smack Teller.]

Penn: The most frequent question we get asked about this show is, why would assholes like Brian Brown and Michael Medved come on a show called Bullshit! to get called "assholes"? We do not lie to them; we make sure they know all about the show. We give them copies of past shows, and it's always pretty clear which side of the issue we're gonna be on. The long answer is that people who come on this show generally consider themselves to be bulletproof. Most have never talked to anyone with a dissenting view, and certainly no one with a real research team, like ours. If you say something on our show, we check it. If you lie or make something up, we know. But we're fair — we never take people out of context. We're biased as all fuck, but we try to be honest. Now, that's the long answer. The short answer? [Penn and Teller shrug.]

Penn: And that's something we should never forget. But to conspiracy nuts, death and suffering… are just heart-pounding entertainment. They whack to tragedy!

Eric Hoffschmidt: My first reaction to Flight 93, was that the Military, after the towers had been hit, said "Uh-oh...wait a minute. That's not part of the plan! What is that plane gonna do? Shoot it!"

Jimmy Walter: I firmly believe that most of the alleged passengers on the alleged hijacked planes are still alive and quite frankly, I think they were all probably working for the government.

Penn: Fuck you! We really hope this fuck-up runs into a family member of someone who's died. They may not take kindly to the idea that Daddy's faking his death somewhere.

[Penn & Teller are mocking the Moon Landing Hoax Conspiracy on a stage set w/ Penn as director]

Penn: CUT! Jesus fucking Christ, Neil! How many times do we have to try this? "One small step for A man", not man. A man! And that's YOU! Everybody take five. Neil, practice your fucking lines! Ooh yeah, let's use real pilots. I wanna use real pilots! [to the camera] Faking the Moon Landing is easy. You need dirt, wardrobe, a sound stage, a lot of black paints, and some stupid suits. The hard part is shutting people up. It's been 36 years! You'd think the technicians, and prop people, camera people, directors, everyone who works at NASA, and the Jet Propulsion Lab in Pasadena, and all the nice folks at Cape Carnaval in Florida, plus members of the US Congress and the White House all shut up about this amazing cover-up for all that time? The Government couldn't even fucking cover up a break-in to a psychiatrist's office in a fucking cheesy hotel! Watergate is the answer to all this shit. If they couldn't cover that up, they fucking can't do anything.

Clyde Lewis: Do you really think that one morning in November, 1963, Lee Oswald just got up and said "I'm gonna shoot the President today"?

Penn: Yes, but that's not a very sexy answer!

Penn: If the conspiracy [to kill President Kennedy] is so big and evil, why hasn't it killed Jim [Marrs]? And how did crazy Oliver Stone's movie [JFK (1991)] ever come out?

Vincent Bugliosi: Instinctively, people find it incongruous that this could all happen as the result of the coincidental meeting of the President and a lone nut. They feel that a greater conspiracy has to be involved.

Penn: "Since Mr. Lama has been run out of Tibet, the Chinese have introduced secular education, running water and electricity so maybe life is a bit better on the ground there. Of course the Chinese have also thrown thousands in labor camps and prisons, stomped out as much free speech as possible, and there's that whole fucked up Communism thing. But if you ask Tenzin Gyatso, dba Lama-- what is it with these holy people and their aliases? His Holiness will tell you that he must return to power for the good of his people. In this case, "good" may translate into his people living in squalor and his government condoning slavery. Remember, the lesser of two evils… is still evil. And the enemy of my enemy... is not my friend."

Penn: We're all offended, all the time, and we don't have a fucking right not to be offended! A free country is a marketplace of ideas, and college should be more free, not less.

Penn: Americans believe everybody deserves freedom to move up in the world. That's a great thing. But if moving up means spending four years in a beer commercial run by politeness police, maybe you should think twice.

Alan Kors: What unversities are saying by these codes, special protections and double standards to women, to blacks, to hispanics, to gay and lesbian students, is: "You are too weak to live with freedom. You are too weak to live with the First Amendment." If someone tells you you are too weak to live with freedom, they have turned you into a child.

Penn (voiceover): We can get more federal agents. Wow. What do we have to give in return?

[cut to penn and teller]

Penn: We have to give the government more power, but what power? The patriot act is "an act to deter and punish terrorist acts in the United States and around the world, to enhance law enforcement investigatory tools, and for other purposes". Other purposes? What the fuck is that all about? Other purposes. You shouldn't even allow that kind of loose language in a fucking gym membership contract.

[Penn tells a campfire ghost-story version of the Texas ghost investigators' hotel experience.]

Penn: And then, the pseudo-scientists dressed in leather stumbled clumsily around the well-lit bedroom. One of them said, the night before, she felt a presence. And the other two… believed her! A battery… went dead. And then the video screen got… got a little weird for a few seconds. They took lots and lots of pictures, and weeks later, when they were developed, a couple of them had lens flare, and they didn't remember fucking up the pictures! And then, the electromagnetic gizmo, that they hadn't calibrated at all… (Dramatic voice) WENT FROM "3" TO "7"! (Teller faints)

Hans Zyger: As the homosexual movement became much more entrenched into American culture starting in the late 60's...it really became an opportunity for pedophiles to make a mass assault on the Boy Scouts.

Penn: Our pal Dino has a Woman/Cat theory. With each additional cat over two, the crazy increases exponentially. 3 cats, 27 times as crazy. 4 cats, 256 times. By the time you get to 78 cats, you have all the crazy in the free world.

[Penn closes the show.]

Penn: There are so many people in the world who need our help, that it's sickening to spend all this money on pets. What about people? Couldn't all the money spent for fake dog balls, diamond collars, and cat food be spent to help people? Sure it could! But I have original mono copies of Bob Dylan's early albums […] Teller has an original bondage cross and handcuffs that Houdini owned […] We both spend three bucks for a cup of coffee, and live in houses that are way more than our families need. All that money could certainly go to helping people, too. Pets are more bullshit that people waste money on. But fuck, we're in glass houses on this one.

Penn: Manners are habits we can cultivate to help us remain considerate of others, even when we're not thinking about it. Of course, real thoughtful consideration for others can easily replace manners. Teller considers that our guests might like to see how the trick works. Thank you, Teller.

Penn: In a recent poll, eight out of ten Americans said rudeness is a serious problem. The other two told our pollster to fuck off!

Dr. John Mayer: My postulate is that people are rude---

Penn: Oh! There it is! Thank you, folks! Good night everybody!

[The credits roll, but then cut back to the show]

Penn: What? There's more show? Damn!

Gloria: If you're in a restaurant with a tablecloth, you do not eat a hamburger with your fingers. Rather, you take your knife, cut it in half, and eat one half.

Penn: (voice over) Have some self respect Gloria. If the chef at this world-class restaurant thought his hamburger would be better eaten in halves, he would have cut the fucking sandwich himself!! You ignorant, self-serving, kill-joy, nit-picking, burger-cutting bitch!! Whore! Asshole! Cunt.

Penn: Today, a disturbing 35% of our school districts require that abstinence be taught as the only option for teens. Even worse, these programs prohibit the discussion of contraception, unless it's about that stupid small percentage of time when it doesn't work. Fuck! When did Washington turn into the Vatican?

Steve Trombley: I think, in fact, we should really call it "ignorance only" education.

. . .

Steve Trombley: We teach abstinence in every course we do…

Penn: [voiceover] Yeah! Planned Parenthood tells kids not having sex is okay, too! The difference is they realize that kids don't fucking listen.

Steve Trombley: But we also live in the real world, and we know that over half of teenagers in this country engage in sexual activity.

[Cut back to Elders.]

Joycelyn Elders: We've tried ignorance for a thousand years. It's time we try education.

Penn: Now, we're not saying you should have sex because so many other people are. We're saying you should make your own rules, decide what's good for you, based on what you think is important. And don't let anything be thrust into you against your will — not a dick, and not someone else's psycho-religious kink.

Penn: So what have we learned? The U.S. government continues to dump hundreds of millions of our dollars a year into misleading, religion-based, anti-sex education. The only good thing about the program? It doesn't work. Most kids just ignore it. Sure, we're throwing away money, but only really religious kids are hurt by it. Our religion-based government can't fuck us up on this because bullshit detection is written into our genes. The sex switch gets turned on at puberty, and no matter how much government or religion twists the truth, they're fighting the honest beauty of love and sex. That's like bringing a knife to a gun fight.

[Penn talks about how people should not try to stop eating because we are wired to eat.]

Penn: If you have the willpower to overcome several billion years of evolution, cool, more for the rest of us. And you can stop fucking too, cool, more for the rest of us. Thanks.

Penn: You know, our pal Marvin Minsky, pioneer of Artificial Intelligence at MIT, says: "I don't work out because we don't know yet enough about the long-term effects. It appears that each hour of exercise may add two hours to one's life - but I don't know of any evidence that this leads to getting better ideas."

[A hippie scene, while Teller is painting a Wal-Mart vest on a woman's otherwise bared torso]

Penn: Now hold on, this isn't some Wal-Mart lovefest. Sometimes, they're really assholes. In 2000, Wal-Mart reportedly paid $50 million to settle a lawsuit filed in Colorado by 69,000 workers who had been forced to work off the clock. In December 2005, Wal-Mart had to pay $172 million to 116,000 California employees for not giving them their legally-mandated 30-minute lunch breaks. So that's at least, uhh... 185,000 people who had a legitimate beef. And, uhh...don't spread it around, but I'm kinda-sort've a Target guy myself.

Penn: The fight to stop Wal-Mart has happened in small towns and big cities alike, all across the country. We went to one of those towns: Greenfield, Massachusetts, population 18,000. Greenfield is not just "Everyone's Hometown". It is, most importantly, my hometown.

[Penn stresses the importance of colon cancer screening, while displaying images from his own colonoscopy.]

Penn: And then there's this asshole... Sometimes it must seem like I'm talking out my asshole. This time, I literally am.

[After hearing a colonic irrigation "therapist" say that a colonic irrigation treatment cleans out junk that lodges in a subject's colon]

Penn: That's bullshit. Your colon is not an English muffin. It doesn't have nooks and crannies. If we didn't put Chris through all this stupid shit today, he would've simply shat out all that shit tomorrow. It's as easy as that.

[Two Hispanic men looking like Penn & Teller come up to the camera. The subtitles are in the corresponding (inaccurate) translation of the language - English subtitles for spoken Spanish, Spanish subtitles for spoken English]

[Translation: My name is Penn Jillette and this is my partner, Teller. What the fuck is that asshole thinking? "Illegal" immigrants are taking the jobs that no one wants to do and that's quickly improving our way of life.]

Penn: What the fuck? What the fucking fuck? What the f-- get the fuck out of here! These are our jobs! What the-- what the fuck? Star! These are our jobs!

[Translation: As long as America offers freedom and opportunity, people will come here on bloodied knees. Fuck yeah! Just like your parents or great grandparents did. A person brave enough to leave home, tradition, and family, to come to America and work for a better life, for him or herself and his or her family, should be welcomed with open fucking arms.]

Penn: And if you can mow lawn, or build fences, or juggle, or do tricks, or write comedy better or cheaper than what we've got, we'll hire your fucking ass. And will use all the time and money and effort you're saving us to-- to live a little. And you know, it's still our names on the fucking show. See, I told you we'd get tits in the show somehow.

Penn: "Provide a Clear and Comprehensive National Mandate for the Elimination of Discrimination Against Individuals with Disablities." That's what the Americans with Disabilities Act says it's gonna do. What the fucking fuck? What is wrong with us? Have we all gone fucking crazy? We think the government is so good at what it does, the war on drugs, the war on poverty, the war on war. The government is so fucking good at that, they can fucking do anything? They can make us all physically equal, they can heal the lame, they can make the fucking blind fucking see! How about the government sticks to courts, police, defense, and corruption, and leaves compassion to people that fucking have that! Motherfuckers!

[Teller, wearing a high school letter jacket, plays on a computer while a group of students and cheerleaders cheer him on.]

Penn: Next time you feel like worrying about fake violent video games, try a little gedankenexperiment: imagine that video games were invented 100 years before football. Picture school video game teams and uniforms and hot-ass cheerleaders with big, bouncing pom-poms. Now imagine after 100 years of extracurricular video game fun, football is invented and introduced to schools. Thousands of kids get real, no kidding, no fantasy, no make-believe broken knees, legs, ankles, cervical trauma, heatstroke, and concussions! [Throughout Penn's injury list, the crowd quiets, eventually becoming totally silent.] ...What would parents do? From 1931 to 2007, 650 kids died... from injuries they suffered playing football. This is not video game violence - this is real violence done to real children by other real children, all encouraged by schools and society. Every parent worries about his or her kids; every adult worries about all children, but you need to pick what you think is worth worrying about.